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Collection: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 9/2/11

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Alan:

Guess which mode of transportation flourished after the East Coast earthquake, as it did in Japan? Cycling. Washington, DC’s Capital Bikeshare had record ridership during the two hours after the quake. David Alpert described the bike rush in the Washington Post.

Mark Hinshaw has an insightful piece in Crosscut. (We put it in Sightline Daily, but you might have missed it.) It documents the way sprawl and foreclosures coincide in greater Seattle.

Many of the communities and neighborhoods closest in to the center of the Seattle metropolitan area — areas with significantly higher densities and older housing stock — actually performed reasonably well during the recession. Value was lost certainly, and some loans are under water, but there is virtually none of the wildly over-sold and over-priced housing found in the outer suburbs and exurbs. A similar pattern is found near other urban centers such as Bellevue and Kirkland.

Later, he concludes:

Those counties and cities and towns that most heeded the tenets of growth management have fared the best in this worst of times. They are emerging with the strongest downtowns, the most stable housing, the best values, and the highest “quality of life.”

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Weekend Reading 8/26/11

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Alan:

Maybe it’s because I am a product of public schools, the father of two public school students (and one public school graduate!), and the son, brother, and ex-husband of public school teachers—two of them with jobs currently insecure because of state budget cuts (while ExxonMobil is reporting record profits)— but I was moved deeply by Garret Keizer’s essay, “Getting Schooled: The re-education of an American teacher” (subs. required) in the September Harper’s. It is, on its surface, an anecdotal memoir of his one-year return to teaching highschool English in the poor, rural, New England school where he had worked many years earlier. An early theme is the challenge of teaching well. He writes, “even under ideal circumstances, public-school teaching is one of the hardest jobs a person can do.” He adds (to my amusement, because I majored in philosophy in college):

“Ludwig Wittgenstein, of modern philosophers perhaps the most sainted, served time as a schoolteacher. I am not surprised. I am also not surprised that he resigned his position after hitting an eleven-year-old boy in the head. I tried to remind myself of that at least once a week throughout this past year, and not so I could fancy myself superior to Wittgenstein. Rather, I wanted to remember that what I had undertaken was by no means as safe or as simple as redirecting the course of Western thought.”

But the deeper message of Keiser’s piece is not about teaching but about the United States. The America he describes in simple, first-person prose is so deeply divided between haves and have-nots, with most of its children among the have-nots, that Keizer begins to speak of us as a country that is “making war on children.” And what struck me as surprising was that, while such hyperbole usually causes me to stop reading and move to something else, in the context of his article, it seemed thoroughly justified.

And, some humor for the week.

Clark:

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Weekend Reading 8/19/11

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Clark:
A 13-year old uses math (hooray for the Golden Ratio) to figure out a new and more efficient arrangement for solar panels. The trick: mimic trees! For extra credit, here’s more on why so many plants have spiral patterns related to the Golden Ratio.

An urbanist’s paean to on-street parking. I’m not sure I agree with every piece of the argument, and I certainly don’t think that we should presume that drivers have an inherent right to use public right of way to store their vehicles. But compared with many of the alternatives—especially surface parking lots or monolithic garages at street level—street parking seems like a pretty good option for pedestrian-friendly design.

Anna:

Weekend Reading 8/12/11

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Eric dP:

Are rich people meaner and more selfish than the rest of us? There’s social science evidence that they are.

Can cities be the cure for what ails us environmentally? In a recent TED talk, Alex Steffen says yes.

Is this guy the worst person in the world? I’d say he’s a contender. (Don’t click unless you want your day ruined.)

Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad? Slate has the answer.

Anna:

With a seemingly ceaseless stream of bad news getting me down lately, I was glad to see this essay on hope by Rebecca Solnit. A big takeaway is that, unlike plain old optimism, hope requires regular care and feeding. “Optimists” she writes, “expect everything to turn out nicely without any effort being expended toward that goal.” To be hopeful means that you work for the change you want and fight for the things you believe in, as so many others are doing now and have in the past. It’s a good reminder if you’re feeling like throwing up your hands and walking away.

There’s never enough time to read everything I want to! Here are a couple of the library books currently stacked on my bedside table (and half-read in my Kindle): Escape from the Ivory Tower: Making Your Science Matter by Nancy Baron, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet by Heidi Cullen, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction, and Opportunity by Mike Hulme, and Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman.

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Weekend Reading 8/5/11

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Eric dP:

I’ve only got one this week, but it’s a doozy. At the Missoula Independent, Matthew Frank’s “Orient Express: Will Montana become a coal colony?” is a first-rate piece about the very real and very localized dangers of a globalizing coal trade. If you care about coal, the West, or climate change, it’s a must read.

Clark:

A tragic story of a four-year-old’s death shows the flaws in how we build roads: “Nelson was found guilty of killing her son by crossing the road in the ‘wrong’ place. But what about the highway designers, traffic engineers, transit planners and land-use regulators who placed a bus stop across from apartments but made no provision whatsoever for a safe crossing? Those who ignored the fact that pedestrians always take the shortest possible route but somehow expected them to walk six-tenths of a mile out of their way to cross the street?”

From Eugene, OR: Super-cool neighborhood sustainability maps, tracking local transportation, services, parks, and other good stuff to have nearby.

Via Sightline pal Callie Jordan, a nifty idea from Bend, OR: adding a power-generating turbine to a gravity-fed municipal water supply line. “The Bend City Council approved plans…to incorporate a hydroelectric facility in the City’s Surface Water Improvement Project…The City expects to gain $580,000 from electricity revenues in the first year alone.”

Does this show that Vancouver, BC housing is expensive, or simply that people are weird?

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Weekend Reading 7/29/11

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I’ve got this week’s recommendations all to my lonesome. Here’s the lineup:

Weekend Reading 7/22/11

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Alan:

The “must read” of the week, for me, was this blog post by David Goldberg at Transportation for America. It describes an infuriating miscarriage of justice in suburban Atlanta, where a drunk driver killed a four-year-old child but the mother was the one convicted of manslaughter. This story perfectly encapsulates so much that’s wrong with the way we usually design and build roads in North America, and how we assign blame for predictable tragedies. (More here.)

Sam Knight had a revealing account (subscription required) of the authoritarian regime and democracy campaigners in Belarus. It’s insightful and helped me think more about the conditions in which people do, and do not, demand change.

Anand Giridharadas penned this spot-on piece against the excesses of the “social entrepreneur” idea for the New York Times. Social change ultimately requires taking power away from those who stand in our way, not just applying an MBA mindset to nonmarket challenges. It is a political process, and it needs street fighters.

Eric dP:

If you live in Seattle, I highly recommend reading Dominic Holden’s gangland slaying of the planned deep bore tunnel in this week’s Stranger. (Don’t miss this explanatory graphic, either.)

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Weekend Reading 7/15/11

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Alan:
I’ve just finished Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, which documents and cheerfully promotes the rising tide of new, Internet-powered means of sharing and reusing things. From cars to extra bedrooms, toys to designer handbags, business loans to garden tools, scores of new companies and nonprofits are figuring out how to get all the benefits of ownership without all the cost — or ecological footprint. Sightline is looking into such models, and the legal barriers to them, for Making Sustainability Legal, but this book is worth reading just for fun and inspiration.

Weekend Reading 7/8/11

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Eric dP:

By far the coolest thing I read this week was Craig Welch’s front page coverage of the latest wolf pack documented in Washington, this time in the Teanaway region. Several years ago I was driving over Blewett Pass at night, not far away, when I had to skid to a stop to avoid hitting an animal crossing the highway. For a few seconds my headlights illuminated a big rangy husky-looking… what was it? My wife insisted it was someone’s dog on the loose, but it looked exactly like a wolf. I’m going to take this opportunity to say it now: she was wrong, and I was right.

The Seattle Times also had a good profile of local activist Elizabeth Campbell by reporter Lynn Thompson. There are plenty of things Campbell and I disagree about, but it seems to me that great places need people like Campbell who aren’t willing to go along easily with what leaders want.

I also very much enjoyed reading PubliCola’s latest installment in a series: Cara Vallier’s wistful essay on Seattle’s transformation over the last few decades.

On the national scene, Steven Mufson had a great account of the unpredictable forces behind oil prices in the Washington Post. And in New York magazine, Frank Rich had a scathing analysis of Obama’s failure to wrangle the country’s financial sector.

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Weekend Reading 7/1/11

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Clark:

The Onion gives a sage warning about the dangers of wind power.

Switzerland is getting big into traffic calming—which served as fodder for a somewhat annoying “debate” in The New York Times opinion pages. I confess that 350-word opinion essays don’t do much for me anymore…but perhaps others like that sort of thing more than I do.

Yellow pages vs. the internet.

News from far away, but possibly relevant to toll-road debates here in the Northwest:  the Maryland Department of Transportation has resorted to advertising to attract drivers to an underused toll road. The advertising alone costs about as much as 3 months worth of toll revenue. It seems weird to see state government shilling for drivers.

Eric dP:

I’ve got four completely unrelated good reads this week.

At the NYT’s Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin has heart-wrenching coverage of the world’s vanishing frogs.

At The Tyee, Jon Beasley-Murray has one of the more thoughtful and insightful pieces about the Vancouver hockey riots.

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